ERROL CASTENS: Ending the slaughter of innocents?

Dear Mr. President: Thank you for your promise to make our country safer for children.
You noted Wednesday, “In the month since 20 precious children and six brave adults were violently taken from us at Sandy Hook Elementary, more than 900 of our fellow Americans have reportedly died at the end of a gun – 900 in the past month. And every day we wait, that number will keep growing.”
Well said, Mr. President.
Yet there’s an ongoing massacre that renders all the gun-related deaths that have ever happened in America statistically insignificant.
Since evil was unleashed at Sandy Hook, 3,315 children have been slaughtered in America – not in a month’s time, but every DAY. (That’s using 2008 statistics, the latest available from the Guttmacher Institute.)
That’s a confirmed body count of more than 109,000 Americans killed in the United States from the Sandy Hook shooting until the hour you were outlining your anti-violence proposals, Mr. President.
Each of the 900 gun-related homicide and suicide victims you mention represents a tragedy, sir. But for every one person killed by firearms, 121 were killed by curette and forceps or poison – ripped out of their mothers’ wombs, chemically scalded or stabbed in the head.
But no SWAT teams rush into abortion mills. Abortion victims’ screams don’t pierce the air. No anguished parents try to break through police barricades, desperately hoping against hope to find their children alive.
We keep this massacre behind closed doors, conveniently keeping the icky factor at arm’s length.
The tragic death of 20 first-graders apparently gives you license to pass all kinds of new laws, constitutional or not, yet you dismiss the federally sanctioned slaughter of 50 million innocents in 40 years of Roe v. Wade as the exercise of a sacred right.
With all due respect, sir, you don’t really believe that. As a father, you well remember that a gestating life is indeed a life.
You and Mrs. Obama loved Sasha and Malia while each was still unborn. You talked to them, sang to them, dreamed dreams for them. And surely you would have tried to protect them if anyone had threatened their lives in the womb.
And despite the legal blinders it has worn for 40 years, even the U.S. government recognizes gestating life as worthy of protection: Destroying an eagle egg is a crime punishable by prison and six-figure fines.
Who are we, Mr. President, to decide that unborn humans are less deserving of protection than unborn birds?
Here’s another part of your speech from Wednesday: “[I]f there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there is even one life that can be saved, then we’ve got an obligation to try.”
Mr. President, I’m sure if they had voices that the 50 million victims of America’s biggest massacre would agree.
Contact Daily Journal Oxford Bureaureporter Errol Castens aterrol.castens@journalinc.com.